Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s statement and answers to media questions following talks with OSCE Secretary General Feridun Sinirlioglu, Moscow, March 11, 2025

Ladies and gentlemen,

The conversation with OSCE Secretary General Feridun Sinirlioglu was substantive and candid. We’ve known each other for a long time. We know our Turkish colleague as a seasoned diplomat from his work as Permanent Representative of Türkiye to the United Nations, UN Special Coordinator for Afghanistan, and his positions at the Foreign Ministry of the Republic of Türkiye.

We discussed the current state of affairs at the OSCE. We are compelled to admit that, in recent years, the leaders of this organisation have been making up excuses not to come to Moscow. The most recent visit by OSCE Secretary General Helga Schmid, a citizen of Germany, took place in June 2021. Later, in mid-February 2022, former OSCE Chairman-in-Office and Polish Foreign Minister Zbigniew Rau paid us a visit. Since then, no contacts at this level have ever taken place.

We appreciated the decision of the new Secretary General, who had no doubt that communicating with the leading OSCE members was indispensable and important for performing the duties of the Head of the Secretariat.

Mr Sinirlioglu has inherited an unenviable legacy, because, by and large, more recently the West has banned itself from maintaining a dialogue with us and extended this ban to the OSCE, an international organisation. Truth be told, there were some contacts, but not at the level that was typical of our relations since when the Helsinki Final Act was first signed. The West willingly annihilated the principle of consensus and did everything to make the OSCE get rid of consensus and become a Ukraine-centred tool to teach the Russian Federation “good manners,” which eventually led to an abysmal institutional crisis. We have laid out our assessments in detail in our keynote address to the OSCE Ministerial Meeting in Malta in December 2024. Anyone can access them and get familiar with what they say.

Fifty years ago, back when the OSCE was a Conference, the pan-European process was an unparalleled regional platform (we were reminded of it with a fair share of sadness today) for East-West contacts amid the Cold War. An “all-weather communication mechanism,” as it was referred to, was created. Furthermore, the dialogue on all three baskets, including the military-political, humanitarian, and economic and environmental, continued unabated, even during acute crises, including in 1999, during NATO’s barbaric bombings of Yugoslavia. Diplomatic activities in Vienna were not halted for a minute, even though the head of the OSCE mission in Kosovo had a hand in justifying the bombings and looking for a pretext to greenlight them.

Once again, we regard today’s visit by the Secretary General as a symbolic event heralding the return. We have a long way to go. However, Secretary General Feridun Sinirlioglu wants to return to the roots of this organisation. We will support him in every possible way on this path.

We discussed OSCE’s potential to adapt to existing geopolitical realities and to become a building block of the new security architecture. Initiatives are about to take shape that focus not on Euro-Atlantic concepts, but on a Eurasian approach and Eurasian architecture. That would make sense considering the geography and connectivity of our vast continent. Of course, we want to revive the principle of indivisible security - indivisible security and sovereign equality of states - the way it was enshrined at the top level during the OSCE Summit in Istanbul in 1999 and reaffirmed at the OSCE Summit in Astana in 2010. I hope that the Secretary General’s experience and energy will help us oppose the Westerners’ unending push to keep using the OSCE in their own interests, and to ignore the UN Charter and the OSCE basic principles.

They are trying to leverage the organisation’s resources to help NATO and the EU continue supporting the Kiev regime, to justify and provide media and political support to provision of massive military and other aid to this regime, while turning a blind eye to Kiev’s gross violations of its commitments to ensure the legitimate rights of ethnic minorities and human rights in a broader sense that they assumed at the UN and the OSCE. These commitments are being violated in the most flagrant manner with regard to Russian-speaking residents and ethnic Russians, as well as Hungarians, Bulgarians, Poles and representatives of other ethnicities, in Ukraine.

We discussed ways to resolve the Ukraine conflict. We made our position clear. President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly emphasised his availability for talks, and reiterated the principles that must be accounted for if we want to come up with a lasting solution to this crisis by first eliminating its root causes. He spoke about this in great detail at the Foreign Ministry in June 2024. He also discussed this on February 12 during a telephone call with President Trump. The ensuing contacts between Russian and American officials confirmed, in addition to the main objective of normalising relations between our two great powers - even though the differences didn’t go anywhere - that the dialogue cannot be interrupted. We are prepared to discuss Ukraine issues with anyone who is genuinely interested in advancing this matter.

We also discussed the fact that the OSCE focuses on three main areas - three baskets - featuring prominently on its agenda. They haven’t been addressed properly or regularly for a long time now, thus leaving the participating countries unable to discuss important, rather than fleeting, development issues, such as economic, environmental, humanitarian, social and security issues.  

I hope that the OSCE Secretary General’s experience will allow us to depoliticise or at least to initialise - I understand this cannot be done quickly - the process for depoliticising our organisation and taking it back to its origins.

Question: Was the issue of my colleagues, journalists killed in Novorossiya during the special military operation prior to the recognition of the republics as part of the Russian Federation, raised in today’s discussions?

Sergey Lavrov: The safety of journalists was discussed in detail. We highlighted that OSCE representatives for media freedom have adopted the regrettable example set by UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay. In UNESCO’s annual report on journalist safety, she entirely neglected to mention crimes against our compatriots working as journalists in conflict zones.

We delivered a demarche to UNESCO in this regard and will persist in rectifying this egregious injustice. Today, we provided Secretary General Feridun Sinirlioglu with a list of journalists who fell valiantly in the line of duty from the beginning of 2022 to the present day.

Additionally, Chairman of the Russian Union of Journalists Vladimir Solovyov has addressed an open letter to the Secretary General. We handed him the original during today’s talks. Russia will continue to prioritise this issue resolutely.

Question: OSCE leadership has repeatedly cited the lack of an agreed budget since 2022, attributing responsibility to Russia per one participating state’s position. How would you assess the current budgetary situation in the Organisation? Is the OSCE truly nearing financial collapse, and if so, who bears blame?

Sergey Lavrov: Regarding the budget, we agreed to the figures outlined in the draft document long ago (the exact date escapes me). Our objection lies in the politicisation of a purely pragmatic, technical budgetary instrument through subjective assessments, as our Western counterparts attempt to do. They then accuse Russia of obstructing adoption by refusing to politicise the financial document. The situation is obvious. Our approval of the figures stemmed from a commitment to reach consensus.

We remain convinced that consensus alone can preserve the OSCE. I am not aware of what the West believes in (likely in little beyond Satan) but it exerts every effort to undermine consensus and to dismantle OSCE. It is hard to think of any other explanation.

Among the concessions we made in accepting the budget figures without challenge are matters concerning the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR). It has no operational criteria, despite the fact that we have been proposing to agree on such principles for nearly two decades only to face categorical rejection from the West. The Office is treated as a “gold standard” permitting arbitrary conduct. Previous Secretaries General and Chairpersons-in-Office established a tradition whereby ODIHR staff overwhelmingly hail from NATO or EU states. They deploy election observation missions capriciously — dispatching two observers to some states and 300 to others. Primarily, they target nations “east of Vienna” while failing to lodge any claims against countries like Romania where blatant electoral abuses are registered.

We will continue demanding transparency across all OSCE institutions. However, at this juncture, the impediment to budget approval does not rest with us.

Question: The OSCE’s new leadership has prioritised support for Ukraine. Given the Organisation’s mandate includes conflict resolution, do you see any potential role for the OSCE in settling the Ukrainian conflict? If so, what form might this take?

Sergey Lavrov: The OSCE was involved in this matter from 2014 to 2022.

The Special Monitoring Mission operated during this period. Today, we discussed the grievances that have accumulated and continue to accumulate against it, including its reluctance to disclose detailed information about who bears greater responsibility for the destruction of civilian infrastructure and targeted artillery attacks against the civilian population. For three years, we urged the OSCE mission to produce a corresponding report. We sought not merely to be informed of the number of casualties and houses destroyed but to have the data broken down by both sides of the contact line. When we finally succeeded, it emerged that civilian casualties and the destruction of civilian infrastructure in Donetsk and Lugansk were five times greater than on the side of the Kiev regime. The report also contained information indicating that, in most cases, the residents of Lugansk and Donetsk were responding to fire, not initiating it.

Numerous grievances have arisen regarding the mission’s work, including instances of information being shared with the Ukrainian side in blatant violation of the principle of neutrality.

No, there are no such plans at present. We need to assess the situation. Generally, the settlement process has not yet commenced. Mr Vladimir Zelensky has publicly stated that he does not want any ceasefire until the Americans guarantee that, if necessary, they will bomb Russia with nuclear weapons. This is roughly how he frames the issue. Therefore, for now, all of this is not serious. We discussed this today.

There have been many proposals to declare a ceasefire and deploy peacekeepers, and only then address the question of where the borders lie and how to proceed. Peacekeepers are now a prominent topic of discussion. There is already debate about whether 10,000 will suffice, or perhaps 50,000 or 100,000. Australia has already volunteered to join, and Canada, of course – where would we be without it? But we have a simple question (we spoke about this today): what will these peacekeepers protect? The remnants of the Kiev Nazi regime, which has enacted a series of laws eradicating Russian culture, language, and media, and has banned the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church? Or will we first seek to end the Kiev regime’s racist practices? This must be addressed first. Otherwise, it all appears as an attempt, through the deployment of peacekeepers, to shield the remnants of this regime from the people’s wrath.

Question: In light of reports on mass killings and escalating ethnic conflict in Syria, does Russia possess the capacity to assist conflicting parties in reaching a diplomatic solution and halting further bloodshed? If so, what might such a resolution entail? If not, why?

Sergey Lavrov: Regarding the European security architecture, there has been extensive discourse on this subject. We have also thoroughly examined the emerging trends.

Until recently, the Euro-Atlantic concept predominated. This is embodied in the North Atlantic Alliance and the OSCE. Given that the European Union, by signing relevant agreements with NATO, has aligned itself with the bloc, it too fits into the Euro-Atlantic framework as part of this architecture.

Our continent is larger than the OSCE space. There is no pan-continental organisation or structure here. In Africa, there is the African Union, while Latin America has CELAC. Yet in Eurasia – the largest continent, richest in natural resources, and boasting immense potential in terms of logistics and the development of efficient communications (transport, etc.) – there is no such umbrella structure for all countries of the continent to regularly convene. Although there are many sub-regional structures such as the EAEU, CIS, CSTO, SCO, ASEAN, GCC, the Organisation of Turkic States, as well as a host of others. Nowhere do all the countries of the continent gather in one place.

Against this backdrop, it is noteworthy that several years ago, our NATO “colleagues,” led by the administration of Joe Biden, increasingly began to speak of the “Indo-Pacific region” (not the Asia-Pacific) as an area of particular priority for the United States. This was also affirmed by the administration of Donald Trump, which stated that Washington’s primary interests lie in eastern Eurasia and the Pacific coast. Europeans have even expressed resentment that the United States is paying them less attention and reorienting there.

Long before the current administration, the United States, through NATO, began advancing the concept of the North Atlantic Alliance’s responsibility, in essence, for the entire Eurasian continent. Former NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg was asked about their extensive activities in the “Indo-Pacific region” and their initiatives, such as the creation of AUKUS (the alliance between the United States, Great Britain, and Australia with a nuclear component), various quads and trios, including the US–South Korea–Japan framework, where nuclear component exercises are also planned, and the promotion of a range of other non-inclusive, limited-membership structures. After all, NATO is an alliance that has declared and continues to declare the defence and protection of its member states’ territories as its goal. Stoltenberg unabashedly stated that this remains the case, and they are still doing only what is necessary to protect the territories of member states, but the threat to these territories now emanates from the South China Sea, the Taiwan Strait, the Korean Peninsula, and so on.

In the absence of a pan-continental security structure in Eurasia, NATO has already begun to subtly work towards subordinating all security processes on this vast continent. It is evident that this is an unacceptable endeavour that fundamentally undermines the very principle of indivisible security enshrined in OSCE documents. We very much hope that the Secretary General and his team will champion the necessity for all OSCE participating states to steadfastly respect what their presidents have signed up to.

Question: Former ambassador of Greece to Ukraine has recently made public that OSCE staff members passed on the data on targets and our armed forces’ coordinates in the Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics to the AFU. The Ukrainian armed forces open direct fire at those positions. Did you discuss, during today’s talks, these or similar “cooperation efforts” by the OSCE personnel with the Kiev regime? 

Sergey Lavrov: We did discuss this issue, and have provided concrete facts. This became a matter of public discussion not only after the former Greek ambassador to Ukraine made his statement; these facts had already been known. Today, we referred to them while informally discussing OSCE’s possible involvement or role in further action regarding the Ukrainian conflict.

Of course, Mr Feridun Sinirlioglu’s predecessors in charge of the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission grossly violated their commitments, exceeding their authority and forcing the staff to work in a non-transparent manner. A whole number of staff members assisted one of the warring parties in blatant violation of their mandate.

I have forgotten to answer one of the two questions from RT. We are concerned about the developments in Syria. Given the joint efforts that we have made over the years with our partners and members of the international community to ensure peace and the security of all political, ethnic and religious communities in this country, which is friendly to us, as well as to ensure that it faces no terrorist threats.

Our contacts so far with the representatives of the new authorities in Damascus have shown that they are sympathetic to these messages conveyed to them not only by us, but also by virtually all their other partners in the Arab world, the United States, the West, China, and India. Such an outbreak of violence is absolutely unacceptable.

We have drawn our colleagues’ attention to the fact that all the necessary assurances were given during the telephone conversation between President of Russia Vladimir Putin and Ahmed al-Sharaa, during the visit to Damascus by the interdepartmental delegation headed by Deputy Foreign Minister and Special Presidential Representative Mikhail Bogdanov, and during my meeting with Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Syrian transitional government, Asaad al-Shaibani, in Ankara. The course towards national harmony and inclusive political processes was reaffirmed.

The first Syrian national congress has taken place. This initial experience should be continued to build a solid foundation for the state and draft a constitution. In view of these unacceptable developments on the coast, there must be a non-alternative approach to ensure that all representatives of the various ethnic, confessional and political groups are included in the political process without exception.

On Sunday night in New York, our permanent representative, together with the US permanent representative, proposed to the UN Security Council that urgent closed consultations be organised in a businesslike manner, without publicity. During these consultations, which took place yesterday, the Secretariat and Special Envoy of UN Secretary-General for Syria briefed the Security Council members. The Council is currently working on its response, which I hope will be promptly made public.